Uber Just Revealed Its Plans for Flying Cars Within a Decade

Uber just rolled out its first batch of self-driving cars on the streets of Pittsburgh, but the $68 billion ride-hailing company is already thinking about what’s next: taking its cars off the streets, and putting them in the sky. In a white paper published to Uber’s Web site and first reported by Wired, the company lays the groundwork for Uber Elevate, an “on-demand aviation” project. Such an endeavor, which the company says could happen within the next decade (barring, of course, pesky F.A.A. regulations getting in the way) could reduce congestion and radically shorten commutes. A trip from San Francisco to San Jose, which would ordinarily take two hours by car, would be a 15-minute flight.

It’s not the first time that Uber has toyed with the idea of air travel. Onstage at the Nantucket Conference last month, Uber’s chief product officer, Jeff Holden, told Recode’s Kara Swisher that Uber was considering some type of air taxi. “It could change cities and how we work and live,” Holden said. In the past, Uber has done promotions with helicopters, including one with the Uber-for-helicopters start-up Blade, to take customers to the Hamptons. Uber’s own aircraft would be on-demand, fully electric, and take off and land vertically, much like a larger version of the consumer drone technology currently available.

Wired reports that Uber’s flying cars could travel at 150 miles per hour for about 100 miles, carrying several passengers and a pilot (so no, for the time being, the hypothetical flying cars are not autonomous, though Uber suggests they could be eventually). Uber says it would follow its playbook for autonomous vehicles—which it doesn’t plan to build itself—and work with other private companies to make its flying cars a reality within a decade. Still, regulatory obstacles could be a nightmare to overcome: the F.A.A. doesn’t have any regulatory framework for anything like what Uber is proposing, and has never certified a commercial electric aircraft. The complex nature of having flying cars moving around in the sky would require a multitude of safety measures to keep the aircraft from crashing into each other and put people’s minds at ease. And not every tech luminary shares Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick’s vision for a world with flying cars. Onstage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in 2014, Tesla C.E.O. Elon Musk expressed his doubts about flying cars: “If the sky was full of cars flying all over the place, it would affect how things look,” he said. “It would affect the skyline. And it would be noisier and there would be a greater probability of something falling on your head. Those are not good things.”